HELP!!! Still unable to get rid of the Ramshorn snails

This is a discussion on HELP!!! Still unable to get rid of the Ramshorn snails within the Beginner Freshwater Aquarium forums, part of the Freshwater Fish and Aquariums category; -->
Well the struggle continues to remove ALL of the Ramshorn snails from my 25 gallon Guppy tank. There is no wood, no plants and ...

Well the struggle continues to remove ALL of the Ramshorn snails from my 25 gallon Guppy tank. There is no wood, no plants and I am feeding such a sparse bit of food and still doing huge water changes and vacuuming out the gravel really well but still they continue to show up in the tank. The numbers are depleted for sure with only a dozen or so on the glass each morning when I flick on the tank light and they are very very small but still they exist and I fear another hostile take over.

What are these things living on?

How long until I can hope they are truly all gone?

Do I absolutely HAVE to change out all of the gravel?

Is there nothing else I can do to make sure they are gone without taking down the whole tank? I have also gone so far as to remove the filter media and clean out the filter unit. Still more snails show up. As small as they are, I can only assume they are freshly hatched babies. How is that possible? At what age/size can they reproduce? I think I have gotten all the snails of any significant size. The largest one I have seen in a few days is smaller then a pencil eraser. Maybe 1/4 that size, actually.

I need suggestions from people who have been through this. I will take suggestions from anyone actually. HELP!!!

There are some fish, such as loaches, which eat snails i think and their eggs - but this depends on how hard the shell of the snails are...I'm not sure how aggressive they are either so I'd ask about them and make sure the yare ok with your aquarium fish.

I wouldn't be optimistic about eradicating them all unless you get a snail killing fish. I don't know how they got in my tank in the first place, they must have been teeny tiny babies or eggs because I washed off the plants before I planted them and looked at them and didn't see any grown-up snails on there.... If you can't see the teeny tiny babies and eggs in your tank, you aren't going to be able to manually remove them all, there'll always be someone hiding somewhere.

I used it on my new tank which has all of the baby snails sitting on the gravel (impossible to pick off with your fingers like the ones sitting on the glass) and it did a reasonable job sucking lots up. It was very expensive for what it is. It doesn't seem to suck out fine material, but it's good between water changes for sucking up bits of left-over carrot or uneaten algae wafers and stuff that the apple snails haven't eaten (not such an issue in my big tanks, but in the betta tanks the bettas won't finish off any snail food like the fish in the big tanks). And for sucking up little snails .

Throw a piece of cucumber or lettuce in your tank overnight and pull it out in the morning with all the snails attached. Repeat and eradicate your snail problem! Happy Thanksgiving!

Yes, I forgot to add, I have been doing that as well but still, there are those few snails each morning. I wonder how big they have to be before they can breed? How many eggs are hidden in the gravel? What is the time from egg laying to hatching? I am thinking of turning the lights off for longer as well. I thought I could starve them out by feeding so sparsely but obviously, they can live on very little and continue to reproduce in those conditions as well. Have I mentioned, I HATE these snails?

I'm afraid for the death and destruction you are looking for Inga your only option might be some off the shelf snail killer, all the other options are just a way to keep the snail colony under control. Just be careful of what you get so it doesn't harm anything you don't want harmed.

Inga, I don't know your particular situation, but I would not hesitate to dismantle that tank and kill everything in it with ammonia and then re-establish it. Of coarse this would mean you must have a way to keep the fish somewhere else for a while.

I've always been weary of letting amonia come in contact with anything in my tank, makes me nervous that i wont be able to get it all rinsed off. May be unfounded, but I don't have the courage.

I just plucked a couple of these pests from my tank this morning. I put them in a betta bowl and I'm going to try to log their progress by taking pictures of the bowl everyday, just to get an idea of how fast they procreate.

Inga, I don't know your particular situation, but I would not hesitate to dismantle that tank and kill everything in it with ammonia and then re-establish it. Of coarse this would mean you must have a way to keep the fish somewhere else for a while.

Good luck

You run a high risk of leaving ammonia in whatever you put it on and then your fish would probably die, not worth it in my opinion.